It's actually pretty common for major open source projects to have bug reports for seemingly important issues open for years. If I were you I would redesign your system so that it doesn't rely on that functionality. Since it hasn't been fixed in the past decade, the chances of it being fixed anytime soon are very low.

Some other examples
* In MySQL's INNODB engine, the default configuration makes it impossible to recover disk space once it has been allocated to MySQL
* In Thunderbird, the messages shown in the system tray notification when you receive new messages are usually the wrong messages.

People are still using COBOL programs that are full of bugs. If you can't offer a solution that is superior while being cost-effective, than you may as well piss into a strong wind.

I'm not being snarky, just sayin'.

Comments on this post

Jyncka agrees
: People run Coldfusion on shared environments and wonder why their sites crash.

Functionality rules and clarity matters; if you can work a little elegance in there, you're stylin'.
If you can't spell "u", "ur", and "ne1", why would I hire you? 300 baud modem? Forget I mentioned it.

You can call this a bug if you want, but it probably wasn't (and never will be) addressed because there's no real purpose in doing this. If you have need to force position of individual cells, you shouldn't be using a table in the first place. Tables should never be used for positioning content.

It's actually pretty common for major open source projects to have bug reports for seemingly important issues open for years. If I were you I would redesign your system so that it doesn't rely on that functionality. Since it hasn't been fixed in the past decade, the chances of it being fixed anytime soon are very low.

It's common for all projects, not just OSS. Search the .net bug database for "won't fix" and you see some serious issues that Microsoft has just refused to fix.